General Research

Hans Richter - Dreams that Money can Buy -
Dreams That Money Can Buy is a 1947 American experimental feature color film written, produced, and directed by surrealist artist and dada film-theorist Hans Richter.

Collaborators included Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Alexander Calder, Darius Milhaud and Fernand Léger. The film won the Award for the Best Original Contribution to the Progress of Cinematography at the 1947 Venice Film Festival.The basic plotline of the film consists of front man Joe/Narcissus (Jack Bittner) who is an ordinary man who has recently signed a complicated lease on a room. As he wonders how to pay the rent, he discovers that he can see the contents of his mind unfolding whilst looking into his eyes in the mirror. Clients then come into the room for an appointment with him and he gives them dreams, insights into their own minds, with a series of surreal like fantasies.

For my project I think it is relevent in the context of different ways of seeing, distorting what's really going on..




Pervert's Guide to Cinema (vol 1,2,3) Slavoj Žižek

It explores a number of films from a psychoanalytic theoretical perspective. Slavoj gives examples of different movies and psychoanalysis them. For me I guess it doesn't exactly directly relate to my project?? I'm not sure. I guess like because I'm trying to manipulate what the viewer sees, distorting what is the normal for them, it could relate in the sense of how other directors have influenced the audience as to what they see on screen?
An idea I found particularly engaging what Slavoj's analogy of the toilet bowl and the cinema screen. He claims that when we flush something down a toilet, we don't think to where it actually goes, it goes to some sort of other realm. When we look at a cinema screen, it is as if something is coming out at us from another realm (like if something came back from the toilet!).